Arredia: Flood control still well short of expectations
Des Plaines Mayor Tony Arredia had a tough week - touring his city, witnessing the flood damage and hearing the heartbreaking stories of loss. During the height of the storm, he had only about four hours of sleep over two days.
Arredia, who was an alderman for four years and has been mayor for 9, can't run for re-election in April because of the city's term-limit rule. He sat down with the Daily Herald late last week to discuss the most recent flood, and the city's history of flood preparedness.
Q. It's been 22 years since the 1986 flood. Were you frustrated by how much of Des Plaines was under water last week?
Arredia: Yeah, I'm frustrated. Everyone is. But we have to deal with this and we are. We have a procedure that we follow and we follow it every time.
Q. First, let's talk about what went right.
Arredia: We got the people out pretty quickly and we were able to get a lot of the evacuees to safety quickly. Our teams responded well, but we got quite a bit of damage.
Q. You walked all over the city. Was there anything that surprised you or anything you saw that will stick with you?
Arredia: People's furniture in the middle of the street is something you'll never get over. I've been consoling people who lost their wedding pictures and who saw things that were of value to them being tossed into the garbage. It's heartbreaking.
Do we now have to start planning for this kind of response every time a hurricane hits the Texas panhandle? We never had to ask that question before, but maybe now we do.
Q. Did Levee 50 live up to your expectations? What areas of the city did it definitely help?
Arredia: It kept water from getting to a couple hundred houses and that's what it was designed for. They're normally the first people to get hit. The water didn't go over the wall. But 65 million gallons is a lot of water.
Q. Some people on the west side of the river believe Levee 50 made their flooding problems worse.
Arredia: We had people who were saying that the wall made the water deeper. I don't believe that. I understand their frustration, but you can't just throw out comments like that because someone's going to believe them and then nothing will get done.
Q. Is it fair to say that trying to achieve flood prevention has been one of the big efforts of your administration?
Arredia: Yeah, we've tried. Mayors don't have authority to demand that things like this get done. There's nobody that says this project is going to get done.
It's always meetings. We don't have the clout guy who can say, 'Do your job or get out.' The (Illinois Department of Natural Resources) says, 'We're working on the problem.' The Army Corps says, 'We would like to do that, but we need the funding.' The government says, 'Justify the project to us.'
That's the circle. But you need someone to stand in the circle and tell them to do the work. I've told them to put me in charge of getting the projects done.
When we're at war with another country, they build an airstrip in one day. But they say they need 20 years to fix the river? Bull! If we spent the same amount of time as we do defending why we can't do something, we'd probably be doing more than we are now.
If these projects had been done when they needed to be done, they could have been done for half the cost. They say there's $20 million in damage up and down the watershed every year. The levee finally cost $13 million. Explain that math to me.
Q. What's the first thing that needs to happen?
Arredia: Upstream storage is vital ... upstream storage is the answer.
Q. Your term is coming to an end in April. What should be the priority of whoever succeeds you as mayor?
Arredia: Economic development and flood control. What I'm afraid of when I do leave is that all the knowledge and experience I have in my brain from the past 14 years walks away with me.
I think we need someone to kick ass and take numbers. But I don't know who that is.